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The propaganda used by the German Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship of Germany from 1933 to 1945 was a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of Nazi policies.
- As you explore the images in this visual essay, consider what each image is trying to communicate to the viewer. Who is the audience for this message? How is the message conveyed?
- Do you notice any themes or patterns in this group of propaganda images? How do the ideas in these images connect to what you have already learned about Nazi ideology?
- Based on the images you analyze, how do you think the Nazis used propaganda to define the identities of individuals and groups? What groups and individuals did Nazi propaganda glorify?
- Why was propaganda so important to Nazi leadership? How do you think Nazi propaganda influenced the attitudes and actions of Germans in the 1930s?
In operation from March 1933 to April 1945, it lasted almost as long as the Third Reich existed. The camp’s proximity to Munich, the Bavarian capital, dubbed by Nazis the Hauptstadt der Bewegung (Capital of the Movement), only underscores Dachau’s centrality to the history of National Socialism.
- Marshallv
The regime’s demands on its citizens grew as World War II created new economic strains for Nazi Germany. Produced in April 1942, the featured propaganda poster outlines Nazi expectations for individual citizens’ different duties to support the wartime economy.
- 1995.96.66
- US Holocaust Memorial Museum
- April 8, 1942
- Dachau Became A Model For Nazi Concentration Camps
- First The Smell, Then The Death Train
- Bodies ‘Stacked Like Cordwood’
- In A Fit of Rage, Soldiers Gun Down Nazi Prisoners
- Unequipped to Help The Survivors
- From Liberators to Witnesses
When Dachau opened in 1933, the notorious Nazi war criminal Heinrich Himmler christened it “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” And that’s what Dachau was in its early years, a forced labor detention camp for those judged as “enemies” of the National Socialist (Nazi) party: trade unionists, communists, and Democratic Socialists a...
For the unwitting U.S. infantrymen who marched into Dachau in late April 1945, the first clue that something was terribly wrong was the smell. Some soldiers thought they were downwind from a chemical factory, while others compared the acrid odor to the sickening smell of feathers being burned off a plucked chicken. None of their prior combat experi...
The abhorrent sights and smells of the death train left many American soldiers physically sick and emotionally shell-shocked, but it was only a taste of the horrors awaiting them inside the actual camp. In the weeks leading up to the liberation, the Nazis had shipped in prisoners from across Germany and as far away as Auschwitz. Like the survivors ...
When the American soldiers of the 45th “Thunderbird” Division stumbled upon the death train, it was like lighting a fuse that couldn’t be snuffed out. The men of the 45th had been in combat for 500 days and thought they had witnessed every grisly atrocity that war could throw at them. But then there was this train filled with innocent bodies, their...
Chief among the many traumatic experiences that awaited the liberators at Dachau was encountering the surviving prisoners who numbered around 32,000. “Walking skeletons” was the only way to describe their condition of extreme malnourishment and illness. Ridden with typhus and lice, the overwhelmed prisoners grabbed at their liberators’ uniforms in ...
Most of the American GIs who liberated Dachau only stayed for a few days before moving on to other missions. The care of the survivors was entrusted to combat medical units, while teams of engineers were charged with burying bodies and cleaning up the camp. Word of what happened at places like Dachau and Buchenwald spread quickly through the Allied...
- Dave Roos
In 1943-44, as Nazi Germany’s war effort desperately needed workers, the population at Dachau, bereft of all rights, supplied thousands of men to the Third Reich’s huge and draconian program of slave labor.
Dachau was the concentration camp that was in operation the longest, from March 1933 to April 1945, nearly all twelve years of the Nazi regime. Dachau's close proximity to Munich, where Hitler came to power and where the Nazi Party had its official headquarters, made Dachau a convenient location.
